When we moved house about 18 months ago we tried unsuccessfully several times to get a broadband connection before finally being told we were waitlisted because the service was oversubscribed in our area. It's a new suburb that is growing rapidly... In the end we went with Vodafone 3G wireless homeline and broadband. I just read another thread about the Telecom Wholesale address finder and got the image below:

Our address is in all three coloured areas. Would it be fair to assume we have basically no chance of getting fixed line broadband until the upgrade is done and would that be June or Dec 2011? The 3G is better than nothing but it's expensive, is only good for 6GB a month and our speeds only average about 400kbps. Any advice would be much appreciated.

Have you look @ fixed wireless options? There are various suppliers I believe around Christchurch but I'm not sure if you'll be too far away to be hooked up. If Telecom wholesale is the only one who provision ports for your area then yes you really have no option than to wait for them unfortunately...

Vodafone *may* run their red network there whcih you may be able to sign up to? Not sure though.

Zeon: Have you look @ fixed wireless options? There are various suppliers I believe around Christchurch but I'm not sure if you'll be too far away to be hooked up. If Telecom wholesale is the only one who provision ports for your area then yes you really have no option than to wait for them unfortunately...

Vodafone *may* run their red network there whcih you may be able to sign up to? Not sure though.

Zeon: Have you look @ fixed wireless options? There are various suppliers I believe around Christchurch but I'm not sure if you'll be too far away to be hooked up. If Telecom wholesale is the only one who provision ports for your area then yes you really have no option than to wait for them unfortunately...

Vodafone *may* run their red network there whcih you may be able to sign up to? Not sure though.

The Map above shows the address being moved onto a Cabinet in Dec next year, so Red-Network will be a no-go unless VF does go with Sub-Loop Unbundling in the future

Which as the OP has noted is not till Dec 2011, in the meantime you will need to wait till a port comes free on the old ADSL1 service, with a cabinet upgrade looming extra ports are unlikely to become available till then.

Compass look like they have not keyed all the proper figures into their radio prediction software and that they just predicted up to a certain range XXkm- and they probably have bigger antennas which will cover further.

Ray TaylorTaylor Broadband (rural hawkes bay)www.ruralkiwi.com

There is no place like localhostFor my general guide to extending your wireless network Click Here

Compass look like they have not keyed all the proper figures into their radio prediction software and that they just predicted up to a certain range XXkm- and they probably have bigger antennas which will cover further.

I can almost guarentee that as long as you have a Line of Sight to their transmitter, you will almost be guarenteed a service, even if you are outside of their "footprint". They'll just put a higher gain antenna on your roof. The pricing looks pretty spot on.

Thanks for that, we have line of sight to Sugarloaf so that could be promising. I wonder what the actual download speed would be though, as probably the biggest problem we have with VF3G is getting streaming media to work. I'd love to be able to get the MotoGP hi-res live stream @ 1200kbps

Thanks for that, we have line of sight to Sugarloaf so that could be promising. I wonder what the actual download speed would be though, as probably the biggest problem we have with VF3G is getting streaming media to work. I'd love to be able to get the MotoGP hi-res live stream @ 1200kbps

I have always wondered how good the actual speed is, but for a 1200kbps stream you would at least need the 2Mbps plan, any compass users care to comment?

It depends what radio technology they use to deliver the data over the air and what wireless protocol they use. You might be very lucky and get a solid 2mbit stream, but the problem with wireless broadband is when many people need data at once.

If its TDMA based technology or uses some sort of radio polling then you should be good, but if 5 people want 2mbit at once, for a long period of time, it may stress the base station out and you might only get 1mbit.

Its like a home wireless access point which doesnt use TDMA. You can have 54mbits of data streaming through the access point radio from the wired lan, but if 2 wireless users stream data through it, the total throughput drops - it may be that instead of sharing 54mbits, the two users would have to share 28mbits. This is because of the collision mechanism that the clients use. This scales up to bigger long distance radio networks - unless they use TDMA or polling.

TDMA gives each radio a set amount of time to talk, then the next radio has a turn. Rather than collision based radios where if 2 talk at the same time, they both pick a random number and wait that random amount of time before trying to talk again.

Since they are selling a voip service - it must be rather reliable and they should have some sort of polling.

If you get this installed, i would love to see photos of the client radio antenna / transiever equipment they use.

Ray TaylorTaylor Broadband (rural hawkes bay)www.ruralkiwi.com

There is no place like localhostFor my general guide to extending your wireless network Click Here

That could be using something like that 900mhz Trango stuff if that's the kind of footprint they are selling on. Fixed wireless in my experience is very reliable and the speed is far more consistent than on DSL. We use Araneo @ our main office as a fibre alternative and Wimax at Wellington branch. Both are reliable and provide very consistent speeds. I was looking at ubiquiti networks for a point to point and some of their point to multipoint solutions talk of 100mbps+ speed

Zeon: You can still use red network on cabinets - the sync speeds won't be as good but Chrosu have a process of delivering a circuit to the main exchange via the new cabinets.

So you might be able to connect Vodafone or Orcon, but sync speed/stability will be affected once your neighbours get cabinetised in December and Chorus might develop policies of moving users to cabinets if they have too many problems with noise margins etc. But I have to say the blue area is close to the exchange so shouldn't be so bad anyway. I would look at the fixed wireless again too (unfortunately needs line-of-sight to the base station) but Compas used to perform very well despite the data caps.

Qualified in business, certified in fibre, stuck in copper, have to keep going ^_^

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